Le Secret EP

Prophecy;
2011

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According to its founder and, for years, its sole studio member, Neige, Alcest have almost always made extremely personal music. Though he founded the band in 1999 and issued four rough-and-raw black metal blasts two years later, he didn't properly debut Alcest until 2005, with the two-track, 27-minute EP Le Secret. After 2001's Tristesse Hivernale, he'd realized that direct black metal wouldn't allow him to communicate the intimacy of his ideas, so on Le Secret, a typhoon of blast beats and tremolo guitar essentially created a cocoon for his delicate French voice. Long passages of gentle drift-- birdcalls, operatic introductions, quietly galloping guitars-- surrounded those bits of fury.

Those perpetually nested sounds were, it turns out, the musical manifestations of things Neige had seen in adolescent dreams: "Since my childhood, I've had the impression of being in contact with a luminous, far-off country. I have named it trivially 'Fairy Land,'" he explained in a 2006 interview. "My goal with Alcest is to transpose in musique my memories of this Fairy Land... beyond all terrestrial and real beauty."

Neige recently re-recorded those early tracks with full-time Alcest drummer Winterhalter; Prophecy Productions combined the retakes with the original recordings, reissuing the long out-of-print work in five distinct editions. There are two versions of the vinyl LP, the standard jewel case CD, and a version of the disc encased in cloth and a heavy cardboard sleeve. For the Alcest obsessive, one version even puts the cloth-and-cardboard disc inside an engraved wooden box with a key, a handwritten lyrics sheet from Neige, a brooch, and a few ivy leaves, ostensibly plucked from the boughs of Fairy Land. Pressed in an edition of 500, that disc costs just less than $75.

The new takes on the two old songs-- "Le Secret" and "Elévation"-- closely mirror their forebears in structure and style. Both the production and volume are enhanced, with the lonely guitar notes and bass mumbles at the start of the title track now sounding less like separate whispers. The drums are bigger and, thanks to Winterhalter, they're bolder, often pulling away from the relentless blasts Neige once played by himself. Winterhalter's the better rock drummer, adding nuance and flash where his boss once simply bored forward. The new versions are better at being pretty, too, especially during "Elévation". Here, Neige sends spectral harmonies floating through a tense electric guitar matrix, and, for the first time, it indeed sounds like a dreamland. In that same 2006 interview, Neige understandably balked when asked about the "sinister mode" of the vocals. Here, you'd have a hard time making that misinterpretation. This is Le Secret as it's always been, then, just emboldened and improved by the experience and expansion of Alcest.

Still, it's hard to hear this second iteration of Le Secret and not be at least a bit skeptical about its cash-in nature. These aren't radical reinventions or even vast improvements on the originals, which, though long out-of-print, have long been available for download online. Even if those first recordings sounded more rudimentary or rushed, the first Le Secret succeeded with the same sidewinding, ultra-dynamic structures and mix of brutality and beauty found on this version. These re-recordings succeed only in upping the production and performance value, not in documenting how they funnel directly into the later (and better) songs on 2007's fine Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde or 2010's brilliant Écailles de lune.

Sure, this retrench proves that Neige has developed as a guitarist and vocalist, and that, with the addition of Winterhalter, Alcest have improved as a band. But you could hear that much throughout Écailles de lune, not to mention Neige's progression as a composer and arranger. Indeed, over the last half-decade, he's become better at building transitions and at creating spaces where disparate ideas sit naturally with each other. Le Secret's shifts between bird calls and black metal, between roar and repose, felt rushed and uneven in 2005; in 2011, despite how much Alcest have progressed since that start, they still feel that way. They just sound better doing it.